First woman to bicycle around the world? Annie Kopchovsky Londonderry

Annie Kopchovsky, 1894

Her bloomers were soon adopted by most female cyclists

Credit: We Love Cycling

Annie Cohen (1870-1947) was born in Riga Latvia to Leib and Basha Cohen. Her entire family moved to the USA in 1875, settling in Boston. In 1887, her father died first and then her mother. Her older sister Sarah was already married, leaving teens Annie and her brother Bennett to take care of their younger siblings.

In 1888 adolescent Annie Cohen married Simon Kopchovsky, a ped­d­ler. They had three children in the next four years: Bertha Malkie, Libbie and Simon. Her brother Bennett married, and they had two child­ren. Simon was a devout Orthodox Jew who studied.. while Annie sold advertising space for daily Boston newspapers.

In 1894 two Boston business men bet that no woman could beat the record for cycling around the world; probably the two Boston men were savvy marketing staff from Columbia Bicycles. In any case the first man to do it, Thomas Stevens, had set the record (32 months) 10 years earl­ier. If any woman succeeded in the challenge, she’d win $10,000. 

Annie had two brief cycling lessons in the days before the chall­enge, and was given a women’s Columbia safety cycle. In June 1894, she stood before a crowd of 500 vocal support­ers in Boston Mass, to circumnavigate the world on a bicycle. That a woman was leaving her husb­and and 3 children to fend for themselves, while she took off around the world on a bike ALONE, was a radical feat then.

Before departing she needed money to get on her way; she set off with only a change of clothes and a pearl-handled rev­ol­ver. Annie had arranged for the spring water company Londonderry Lithia to sponsor her, handing over $100 in front of the crowd in exchange for an advertising plaque on her cycle – and the require­ment that she change her name, thus Annie Londonderry was born! She made money through advertising, with influence from Colonel Albert Pope, who owned the Sterling Bicycles Company that made the Columbia bike she first set off on. Annie attached posters and banners to her bicycle to advertise various companies.

The first part of Annie’s journey, cycling across the USA, proved to be more of a challenge than she had expected. In fact she came very close to giving up when she reached Chicago. Her women’s bicycle was desperately heavy and cycling in the full-skirted dress of the time was restrictive and exhausting. At this stage of her journey Annie made two very wise decisions: 1] losing the skirt and petticoats in favour of bloom­ers and 2] ditching the woman’s bike for a considerably lighter men’s one.

Clearly clothing was important. She made the move from skirts to bloomers to a man’s suit during the course of her journey, slow­ly becoming more of an affront to those who thought the sight of a woman cycling was uncouth. Furthermore, many people feared that wom­en straddling a moving saddle would lead to arousal.

Londonderry Lithia Water ad, 1906
flickr.com

She visited Chicago, New York, Paris, Marseilles, Alexandria, Jer­usalem and Yemen, across to Colombo, Singapore, Sai­g­on, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Japan. She coll­ect­ed signatures from the Amer­ican consuls in each place she passed through to prove she had been there. She also sold signed photos and gave lectures for a fee!

Annie loved creating stories for the press. She variously told them she was an orphan, wealthy heiress, medical student or a law student, and told stories about her jour­ney which were full of danger! But her stories, however fabricated, sold and helped to raise Annie’s celebrity.

There were also questions about how much of her journey she was ac­t­ually on her bike; she certainly completed some stretches on boats and trains! But she did a con­siderable amount of cycling, even riding on, after an accident where she broke her wrist or when the bike had a puncture.

Map of Annie’s travels
by her great-grandnephew Peter Zheutlin

In March 1895 she returned to America, landing in San Franc­isco. She cycled her way home, finally arriving triumphantly in Boston in Sept, almost 15 months to the day after leaving. Annie moved with her family to New York, where for months she wrote up her ad­ventures for the New York World, in a column called The New Woman. “I am a journal­ist and a new woman, if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.”

Annie Kopchovsky returned to full time family life and died in 1947.

Conclusion
Until 1894, there had been no female sport stars, no product en­dorse­ments and no young mothers reinventing themselves on wheels.  So Annie Kopchovsky became famous for having cycled around the world between 1894-5, on a trip that was presumably conceived as a vehicle for Annie’s own self-promotion and for advent­ure. She was an incredible woman who used a bicycle as a vehicle by which to make a statement to the world about what women are capable of. Her trip overlapped with an explosion of interest in bicycling and there was a special connection with the Women’s Movement. The bicycle offered women freedom and independence.

See Around The World On Two Wheels by Peter Zheutlin; Adventure Journal and Chasing Annie.